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I recently saw a help wanted ad which stated that they wanted applicants to be "contentious." I am bad. I applied for the job. In my cover letter I said, "I cannot be described as being 'contentious;' however, I am certainly 'conscientious.'"

For some reason I have not heard back from this employer; I can't imagine why not. "Loosers!"

While I am in grammar Nazi mode, it really chaps my cheeks when I see "should of" and "would of" instead of "should have" and "would have." I hate that alot. Stop it. Just stop it.

Someone I know always puts a comma immediately after the noun in a sentence. For example: "Joey, went to the store. Sheila, is pregnant and ready to have the baby." Other than that, his grammar and spelling is actually quite good and it drives me completely bonkers to see his posts on facebook and his home farm's webpage. He's a graphic artist of some type and does a ton of horse/farm ads for magazines and I keep waiting to see one that contains these types of sentences.

A friend's 15 yr old daughter constantly uses "your" instead of "you're" and is also one who spells words with multiple consonants ("yesssss", etc.) on facebook and it makes me want to tear my hair out. I never bother to correct anyone though. I figure it won't do any good anyway and I don't want to come across as a know-it-all wench so I just try to ignore it while correcting it in my head.

It's not about the color of the ribbon but the quality of the ride. Having said that, I'd like the blue one please!

Drawstraws, your friend's comma use after people's names is a confusion of the rule that you use a comma after a person's name if you're addressing him directly. So if you're writing a note, "Joey, please do not forget to feed the stud" then you use a comma after Joey. However, you do not use a comma if you are not speaking to Joey directly (Joey feeds the stud).

Drawstraws, your friend's comma use after people's names is a confusion of the rule that you use a comma after a person's name if you're addressing him directly. So if you're writing a note, "Joey, please do not forget to feed the stud" then you use a comma after Joey. However, you do not use a comma if you are not speaking to Joey directly (Joey feeds the stud).

Paula

Well now, there's another one that makes my head ache. A stud is a farm. A horse that stands at stud is a stallion.

Founding member of the "I Miss bar.ka" clique
Founding member of the "I Miss Pocket Trainer" clique

A stud is a horse kept for breeding (Dictionary.com). Of course it is simply word usage, but not the purpose of my post. If you'd like I will go back to my post and edit my sentence examples to read stallion instead of stud. Would that clarify the purpose of my post?

I recently saw a help wanted ad which stated that they wanted applicants to be "contentious." I am bad. I applied for the job. In my cover letter I said, "I cannot be described as being 'contentious;' however, I am certainly 'conscientious.'"

For some reason I have not heard back from this employer; I can't imagine why not. "Loosers!"

While I am in grammar Nazi mode, it really chaps my cheeks when I see "should of" and "would of" instead of "should have" and "would have." I hate that alot. Stop it. Just stop it.

HorseShine, thanks for the BIG guffaw!

"Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies."

"It's supposed to be hard...the hard is what makes it great!" (Jimmy Dugan, "A League of Their Own")

And here I thought all those people using "welp" to replace "well" were just trying to be cute. Please do tell me that is what they are doing; otherwise, my head might explode.

The ones that use "welp" instead of "welt" do kind of make me shake my head. I have an old high school friend that would tell me she had "welps" from something like being stung by bees. No, you might have "welts" but you don't have "welps".

I wrote this sentence this morning- "He wouldn't be any fun if he was normal." After I hit send, I have fretted over the fact that I really feel like "were" would be a better option than "was" and it is driving me crazy!!!

Yes, it would have been correct to use the conditional tense "if he were normal" because it is a condition contrary to fact. I try to remember the example "if I were King".

I love to use the conditional tense and find it annoying when it is not used when it should be used.

One of my pet peeves is using the word "angst" to mean "become anxious", as in "the horse angst about it" (or maybe they think "anxed" is a word).

The Youth In Asia was a David Sedaris short story I heard on "This American Life" some time ago.

I did have one student spell ludicrous "Ludacris" like the raper once.

This might be my "you kids get off my lawn" stage, but I cannot stand text speech in general writing. For example, notes to me or posts that use "ur" for you're and the like. I simply stop reading and move on to something else.

I used to have students write emails to me entirely in text speak. Excuse me, but this is a university course in organic chemistry!! By now people should be able to speak and write in clear comprehensible english. I wrote back to the same students and told them I would be happy to answer their questions if they rewrote their message in normal english not text language. I'm surprised so many students tried to communicate this way. Thank goodness I was only doing it on the side and not as my full time job.

My pet peeves at the moment are seeing apostrophes used to create a plural, "should of" instead of "should have" (and variations of this), any sort of text speak, and replacement of the letters "T-H" with a D in words like "this," turning them into "dat." Lack of punctuation also drives me batty.